Why venues diverge
Each venue computes funding from ITS book’s premium — different crowds, different collateral norms, different intervals. A coin can print sharply positive on the retail-heavy venue and near-flat where institutions hedge: the same asset, priced for leverage differently in each room. Averaging that into one number manufactures a market that does not exist — the same sin as blending fragmented books.
What dispersion says
Tight agreement across venues means the leverage story is universal — extremes read at face value. Wide dispersion localizes the crowd: one venue’s froth is that venue’s liquidation risk, not the market’s, and its unwind will be sharp but contained. Persistent one-venue premium also marks where arbitrage capacity is thinnest — a structural fact about who cannot trade where.
The cross-venue extreme
The rare configuration worth the most attention: every venue stretched the same way at once. That is a market-wide crowd with no venue left to fade it — the setups behind the largest funding-extreme resolutions tend to start there.
Reading it
Read the table, not the average: level per venue, dispersion across them, and persistence over intervals. One number flattens a structure that was telling you where the pressure actually lives.